14 Sep Coming up with a game plan for trading

Coming up with a game plan for trading

This is bit of a part 2 to my pre­vi­ous arti­cle on where do you start to learn how to trade?  There I men­tion that if you don’t know where to begin. Just start some­where! So, I did. Good thing is you get off your ass and get start­ed. ‘Bad’ side is you get to make many mis­takes and go on detours that could have been pre­vent­ed maybe. But I don’t care. This is my jour­ney. My path. My ‘feet’ that got to do the walk­ing. So I’m doing it my way.

DISCLAIMER

Click here for my dis­claimer. It basi­cal­ly says that I am on my path to becom­ing a trad­er and these are just my opin­ions on how to approach learn­ing to trade. Feel free to check it out and com­ment on it. 

Here it goes…

I don’t care what any­one says. I’ll keep fol­low­ing my own path to become a suc­cess­ful trad­er. Yes, that means I’ll be mak­ing a lot of mis­takes. Rein­vent­ing the wheel and so on. But at least I’ll own them. They’re mine to make. I start­ed trad­ing a paper trad­ing account (fake mon­ey for those that don’t know). Click here to read more on how I got start­ed and switched to a live account (real mon­ey). 

It’s all about the (fake) Ben­jamins baby

I start­ed off with a 2000 dol­lar paper trad­ing account. The inten­tion was to turn that into 5000 fake dol­lars before mak­ing the step to trad­ing a live account. Well, that’s the thing with inten­tions right… We mean so well!!… When I lost half of that account (poor lit­tle fake Ben­jamins) I couldn’t resist the urge no longer. I had to trade with real mon­ey. Of course all the ‘pros’ on YouTube said it. ‘If you don’t trade with real mon­ey, what’s the point?’ (I’m doing a British accent, which obvi­ous­ly is use­less when read­ing. Just have to take my word on how fun­ny it sounds). And as I men­tioned in that pre­vi­ous arti­cle, ‘every­one’s got an opin­ion.’ And that’s OK. Unless, it’s dif­fer­ent than mine. In which case, I hate you! 

Enough silli­ness

Anoth­er strong argu­ment was that I am super smart. I’m not like the rest. I got this. Let’s trade real mon­ey and get super rich super quick (cough) arro­gant! (cough). And off I went. 

I did think about it a bit though. I decid­ed I was going to trade 1500 Euros but divid­ed into 3. For you that don’t know, that means 500 Euros and you should real­ly stop read­ing. Go play with a stick. I trans­fered 500 Euros into my account and look at me now. Yacht boats. Women every­where throw­ing them­selves at me. Cars beyond my wildest dreams. All inside a month! The secret you ask? Well, it’s THE secret. Read more on this life-chang­ing secret here. 

O.K. so there was a bit more silli­ness left in me. Prob­a­bly still is. I’m guess­ing you know what hap­pened. Oth­er­wise… ‘Oh I see a nice stick over there!’. I lost the 500 Euros pret­ty quick­ly actu­al­ly. I decid­ed I was going to take this as a les­son. As I had intend­ed in the first place. Learn from it. And come up with a new bat­tle plan. 

En garde!

After los­ing the 500 Euros, I went back to the draw­ing board. Decid­ed I had to learn from my mis­takes I start­ed to ana­lyze my trades. Came up with a game plan to ana­lyze past price action and the ‘big rever­sals’ and took it from there. I then moved on to look­ing at time cycles of charts as well as reg­u­lar return­ing news events all of which you can read here in this arti­cle.

Same goal, dif­fer­ent approach

Dif­fer­ent, or should I say a more clear approach? I took from expe­ri­ence what I learned and poured it into a new mold. I went back to paper trad­ing. This time a 10k account because it’s more about per­cent­ages to me than it is about the actu­al amount in dol­lars. Try telling that to the sales­per­son when buy­ing a brand new Porsche huh. The aim is to turn this paper trad­ing account into 30k before going back to trad­ing a live account again. Why triple the account? I thought dou­bling it could mean I was lucky where­as tripling it gives more con­fi­dence to it all. 

Damn los­er!

My 10k paper trad­ing account was doing well and I turned it into more than 13k in 2 weeks. Which, let’s be hon­est, is pret­ty good. I know I know. It’s only fake mon­ey. But I am trad­ing cer­tain strate­gies to see if they work. Some work and oth­ers don’t. The ones that don’t work have now dimin­ished my 13k account to less than 7k and if things don’t turn bear­ish soon I’ll blow out my whole account. The rea­son for this is that I am trad­ing a lever­aged account of 50:1 and my gains can be huge, but so can my losses. 

Lever­aged account

I want to explain a bit more what a lever­aged account is and why it turned against me. In order to do this I would have to explain quite a bit on how it works. I will use my per­son­al exam­ples to explain how it went wrong. And of course, how to pre­vent this in the future. So if you’d like to know more, please stay tuned for my next arti­cle on trad­ing a lever­aged account.

Thank you for reading

How did you start trad­ing? What advice do you have for me? Any­thing you’d like to share please com­ment under­neath or con­tact me directly.